Dying Light also stands out among other similar zombie survival games thanks to its brutal melee combat, which feels mostly the same here in the sequel.
The fluidity of movement is just one piece of the puzzle. There’s no sprint button, so you basically gain speed by keeping your momentum up, providing a nice incentive to be as smooth as possible with your parkour. Jumping feels a bit floatier this time around, which took a bit of adjustment to get used to, but ultimately allowed for very precise platforming and very cool death defying leaps across rooftop gaps that always felt super satisfying, especially when on the run. Whichever environment I played in, though, getting around was a lot of fun. Whichever environment I played in, getting around was a lot of fun. I was also able to check out a later environment known as the Central Loop, which traded in the smaller residential buildings of Old Villedor in favor of gigantic skyscrapers that could only be traversed using the new paraglider, ziplines, and pulleys. Look to the rooftops, though, and you’ll find greenery as far as the eye can see, with trees and overgrown grass all lining the tops of the dilapidated buildings, as well as survivor camps that can be powered by climbing rickety windmills, which will help create safe zones with UV light that repel the infected. There are tons of zombies, swathes of brown and gray, and all of the remnants of an abandoned society. There’s a really great dichotomy to the ground and rooftop levels of Old Villedor. The world outside of the Bazaar looks very different as well. Much like any of the big cities you’d see from the Fallout series, the Bazaar is teeming with its own culture and personality, between the church imagery, the sweaters and hoods worn by its inhabitants very clearly looking like medieval chainmail, and the near complete lack of technology all driving home the “modern dark age” theme. The Bazaar is actually just a large church in the middle of Old Villedor that a group of survivors have turned into their home by fortifying its walls, adding small farms, and turning the interior into an actual makeshift city complete with shops, weaponsmiths, hand painted wooden signs – along with scattered UV lights to help fend off the infected. Humanity has fallen back into a modern medieval period, and nowhere is that more apparent than the Bazaar, which serves as the primary safe zone in Old Villedor, the place where the bulk of my play session took place. That’s changed in Dying Light 2, which takes place 20 years after the collapse of society. The original’s open world was a highlight due to how it was designed to be a playground for your parkour skills, but it was so grounded in reality that it really didn’t have a distinct visual style. The first thing that really struck me about Dying Light 2 was its world.